My hands cut through the sand of your manicured beaches like shards of broken glass,
each heaving breath rattling the rune stones in my lungs and the
manacles made of debris around my ankles and wrists.
Foaming waves sprint up the shore to surround me, the undertow hooking
its arm around my waist in a way that is more comforting than your touch ever was.

“I’m done with you,” you’d said, and in the same breath told me that I bore you,
that I am a two-trick dog too old to learn anything new, and that you’re
off to bigger and better things than me.
The salt on my tongue is sweeter than your words
as the ocean churns through me, asking to drag me from the shore.

I contemplate.
A battering from the sea is better than every second I spent
wrapped around your finger, pinkies raised to a toast before your bellowed “Bottom’s up!”
crashed around me, a collision of waves that none of my magics could ever keep at bay.
Go away, go away, go away-- but kings don’t take orders from petty thieves,
so you locked me in the dungeons of my own heart until I took up too much space,
until I was nothing more than another scrap to pollute your ***** ocean.
You shackled me with the plastic that chokes gulf birds and dead rose thorns
and I don’t think either one of us had ever
expected me to survive, but here I am, tides washing me of every haunting touch.

“Water witch,” your chorus had mocked me, but now I call upon the ocean to save me.
Anticipation rises with the waves on the horizon, a wall of a tsunami heading towards me,
towards you, towards every photograph you ever kept of me and the ashes I made of my copies.
Earth will channel her forces and I will direct them towards you,
a biblical flood that will wipe your smug smiles and crooked lies away until they vaporize
and form clouds for your court to paint pictures out of.

Didn’t you realize? I’m a hurricane that just hasn’t been named yet,
and you’re no longer the apple of my peaceful eye.

I’m a water witch, the one who calmed currents to keep you afloat
and misted the air with your favorite summer rains,
the one who made your gardens and your fields grow.

You only ever saw me as a puddle, a murky mirror that hid your own blemishes but
this reflection is at its end.  You only ever saw me as a puddle, but I am
the goddess of the seven seas.
I am the rain and I am the atmosphere.
I am in your lungs and your words and you have forced my hand:
I am the humidity that saps the strength from your bones,
I am the sweat that beads on your forehead from your fruitless labor,
I am the summer storms that precede tornados,
and I am the hurricane on the horizon, the waves that will crash and tumble around your home.

My hands cut through your bruised and littered beaches like the
shards of glass you left in my skin,
digging twisting shapes that will summon the spirits of the water
that only I and my ancestors can master.

On the horizon, waves begin to rise.

we got dressed up for dinner but didn’t go to the dance
it was prom night and we were wasting time in my friend’s basement
when the question was asked:
how many men in your life are you comfortable around?
‘well,’ we said, ‘what do we mean by comfortable?'
we defined it like this:
how many men in your life could hug you
without making you flinch?
none of us had more than a handful, ticking names with our fingertips.
my total was two-point-five:
because i’d trust my dad with my life in the way that
you have to question authority to know that it’s right,
so i don’t ever **** away in fear from his familial touch.
(i’m the only one of us whose father makes the cut.)
the second name on my list is a kid from AP physics.
his name is trent and i’ve had a platonic crush on him for like a year.
we’ve bonded this year over math socks and clorox and death jokes.
(a few hours after this basement conversation,
we’re going to an afterparty and he yells my name
from across the parking lot;
we meet each other, running, and he collides into me with joy.
i don’t flinch away— i meet him half-way.)
the point five is
tricky
see, half the time, my brother grabs me and it terrifies me,
begging for him to just let go because he’s hurting me,
i don’t like tickling because it leads to panic attacks—
i don’t like unsolicited men touching me let go of me let go of me.
when my brother reaches for me, i flinch—
half the time.
but when he wants to actually hug me,
he just lifts one arm from his side and lets me tuck myself
under his shoulder, loose and gentle and loving, like good siblings.
half the time, my brother is reaching, and that is terrifying.
half the time, my brother is offering, and that is comforting.

how many men in your life could hug you without making you flinch?
take
a minute to think about it, it takes a lot of reflection.
a man without boundaries,
who takes what he wants and touches you when he wants to,
a man who doesn’t care that i’m flinching—
rapists and assailants don’t have boundaries,
they don’t listen when you say stop let go of me let go—
how terrifying it is for someone you know to just
grab you whenever he wants to.
i don’t want your hyper-masculine hands touching me without asking.
not unless you’re part of my two-point-five person list.
otherwise, you're just going to make me flinch.